It was one heck of a 2012 cross country season for Oklahoma State University cross country head coach Dave Smith. As his men's team ran to a dominant victory in Louisville at the NCAA Cross Country Championships, Smith now has three national titles to his name over the past four years (in 2011 OSU was runner-up). We had a chance to chat with Smith this past week, where he talked about this season's success, how his program is going from good to great, how his team evolved between 2011 and 2012, and much more.

Scott Bush (SB): Congratulations on a terrific season! Heading into the NCAA Championships, your team was the heavy favorite. What was the race plan and the overall message you were talking about with your guys?  

Dave Smith (DS): Going into the national championships this year I was more confident than in any other year that we had the best team. So, when you think you are the best team, just like when you think you are the best individual in a race, it is best to take the race into your own hands and control your own destiny. We talked about being aggressive and assertive with our race strategy and putting pressure on other teams to try and match that aggressiveness. At the same time, we talked about not giving into the temptation to try and run with any flyers that might go off early in the race. We talked about staying focused on runners that were scoring team points with a secondary watch on the individuals.

SB: What does it mean to you for your team to win its third championship title in four years?

DS: The guys on this team, the teams from the past three years and the teams that came before the championship teams did a lot of work to push this program to the top of Division I cross country. The only guy from this year’s team to run on the 2009 championship team was Girma Mecheso and only Girma, Joe Manilafasha and Tom Farrell ran on the 2010 championship team so it was important for this group to establish its own identity. Coming back after last year’s disappointment without three All-Americans that had run in our top 5 for three years, facing a field with more parity than usual and still getting the win solidifies OSU as more than just a good team. Good teams are competitive for a year or two with a particular group of athletes. Great programs are in the hunt every year. Great programs are about more than any one guy or graduating class. I think with the win this year we are approaching the level of a great program.

SB: The Louisville course was fairly different from the Terre Haute course that was run the previous eight years. Did you train your team any differently this fall to match up with the conditions of the course a bit more?

DS: We added a few little wrinkles to our training and early season racing to prepare for a different style of race at nationals than we have seen in previous years. It was nothing drastic, just some subtle adjustments to our standard program. In the end, I felt like the course was not nearly as much of a factor as many thought it might be. By the middle of the season, I started to get that feeling. We had planned on going to PreNats to see the course in action, but we changed direction and went to Chili Pepper because after the early season race at Louisville, it didn’t seem like the course was as proved to be as strategically challenging as we thought it might be previously. On race day we ran a bit more aggressively than we have in the past but that was more a factor of the team we had less about the course itself.

SB: It seemed like you had the team running with a chip on their shoulder all season long. How do you feel the team approached the season differently this year compared to last?

DS: Last year was tough on all of us. I think a lot of us felt like we let German, Colby and Stubs down by not getting it done. It was hard to see those guys go out on that note after all they had done for the program. So, we had a bad taste in our mouth and we had to live with it for a year. We didn’t talk about it a lot but it was there and we all felt it. Tom, Girma and Shadrack did what we all knew they would and had fantastic seasons. But, it was the guys who hadn’t done it before that really committed last November to being focused and disciplined for 12 months. We had a big group of guys that all made huge improvements and not all of them got to race at the Big 12 or NCAA championships. However, each of those guy pushed those around him and as a result the whole team improved. We had about 8 guys to choose from for our 5-6-7 and at different stages of the season each of those guys looked he might be the guy. Obviously, Joe Manilafasha and Shane Moskowitz had brilliant runs at the NCAA championships and they were the difference for our team on race day.

SB: The team graduated senior leaders like German Fernandez and Colby Lowe and is relatively young. How did the dynamics of the team change?

DS: It is hard to lose guys like German, Colby and Stubs who meant so much more to this program than just their athletic talents. They were good students and great leaders. They were super teammates and were always there to encourage the younger guys and show them how to train. They were dependable and consistent. Colby Lowe was either 9^th or 10^th at the NCAA cross country championships three years in a row. It is very reassuring and pressure reducing to toe the line and know you have guys like those three battling away up front. On the other hand, they are so talented and did so much athletically that sometimes I think the other guys got caught up watching those guys go out and win for us. Like when a basketball team has a superstar and some of the role players just start to rely on him to get the job done. Once some of these younger guys realized that they didn’t have German and Colby to get it done for them, it provided a little urgency in their training and their attitudes. We also had great leaders rise up to fill in those gaps as well. Tom, Girma, Joe and Shadrack are guys that know how to win in high pressure situations, but more importantly they are great guys who each leads in slightly different ways.

SB: With three championships in four years, what are two defining characteristics of your team that you believe puts the Cowboys in contention every fall?

DS: I think one hallmark of our program over the years that has been the most impressive to me and which I think has played a huge part in our success has been the poise and confidence the guys show in races. They are really good at reading the flow of a race, knowing when to move and when to sit back and they never panic. Even when we have been in situations where it might look like the race is getting away from us, where another team has made really aggressive moves and opened up gaps on our group, they keep their cool and work themselves back into contention. I think it takes a lot of confidence to resist trying to cover every move made by an individual or a team and our teams tend to have that confidence. I think it really started with David Jankowski and Ryan Vail. Those guys were cool under pressure. They still are.

That air of confidence they brought to the team has been passed down from guy to guy and every time I think we are graduating that one key guy that brings that calm, cool demeanor, another couple of guys step into that role the next year.  The other thing I think we have and have had for the last eight or nine years is team chemistry.  I know that is at times an overused cliché, but  it is really a big part of our success. This is a really tight-knit group. These guys all like each other, they trust each other, they defend each other and they want to win for each other. They have been willing to put the success of the team first because of that feeling of togetherness.

SB: Over the past few seasons, with all of your team's success and having some big-time recruits coming to Stillwater, how has recruiting changed for you?

DS: Recruiting hasn’t changed much. We still work extremely hard building relationships and trying to find the athletes that best fit into what we are doing. It is still often a high anxiety proposition as we wait for the guys on the top of our list to make their decisions. None of that has changed.  The only thing that has is that maybe the talent level of the athletes we are targeting has risen and we might be competing with a different set of schools than we were six or seven years ago. Bobby Lockhart handles a lot of our recruiting and he does a fantastic job at not only spotting and evaluating talent but at getting to know our prospects and their families and determining which of them would best fit at OSU.

SB: How has your coaching style and philosophies evolved since taking over as the head coach at Oklahoma State?

DS: I think we have become more conservative in our approach over the years. The relative intensity of our workouts has decreased a bit and probably the frequency of our structured workouts has gone down since I first started. At the same time, I have become more and more a believer in big volume. I believe that if one were to just go out and run as he felt every day with no specific structure other than rough mileage goals, he might be 90% prepared to run any race he wanted to run and that is the basic premise we build our training around. We can get more fit or more prepared by adding layers of structure and intensity to our training, but in my mind, each layer you add brings a smaller increase in fitness than the one before. At the same time, I think each layer of structure you add contributes a slightly higher risk of a negative outcome than the previous layer. At some point as a coach or an athlete you have to determine where you want to be on the risk-reward curve. As I said, I have tended more toward the conservative side in that analyisis.

SB: Who have been some of the influences in your coaching career?

DS: Like most coaches, I think I am influenced by numerous sources. My passion for distance running was ignited by my high school coaches Dave Annonen and Don Kruse. They were great coaches who knew what they were doing but more importantly they taught me that to be successful in anything you must love doing it. I probably chose Michigan State as an athlete because Jim Stintzi was very similar in a lot of ways to those two guys and I learned a ton from Jim. Dick Weis, who hired me at OSU has been a coach for 45 years and has been incredibly successful as a coach at just about every level possible. Working alongside him for the last 10 years has been invaluable.

I have also learned a ton from some of my contemporaries and friends in coaching. There are some really good coaches in the NCAA and in the professional ranks here in the US. There are several that I like to bounce ideas off of on a regular basis. A lot of my ideas were hatched in those types of conversations with other coaches. Like most of the NCAA these days our program has a heavy dose of both Arthur Lydiard and Jack Daniels in it as I think that those two guys have pretty much shaped the way most of the NCAA trains. Still, I think I have learned the most and continue to learn the most from observation and interaction with the athletes that I coach.

SB: Reflecting just a bit, what, if anything, would you change about the 2012 cross country season?

DS: We won the Big 12 championship and NCAA championship with an undefeated season for the first time in school history. We only had one guy miss any racing due to injury. Our team GPA is well over 3.0. I think it was a pretty good year and based on the end results, I really can’t think of a reason to do anything differently.